Contemporary Authors

Sarah Menkedick is the author of Homing Instincts (Pantheon, 2017).

Sarah's writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Harper's, Pacific Standard, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Oxford American, The Paris Review Daily, Aeon, Guernica, Amazon's Kindle Singles, and elsewhere. Her essay "Homing Instincts" was selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2014, and her essay "Living on the Hyphen" was selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2015. She was a 2015-2016 Fulbright fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Sarah holds a B.A. in History of Science from the University of Wisconsin and an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh, where she taught nonfiction writing. She is the founder of Vela, an online magazine of nonfiction writing by women.

Sarah Menkedick is the founding editor of Vela. She is a writer, editor, traveler, and mother who divides her time between southeastern Ohio and southern Mexico.

Her work has been featured in Harper’s, Oxford American, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Amazon’s Kindle Singles, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere. Her story “The Rider’s Prayer” was a finalist for The Atavist’s Digital Storymakers Award. Her essay “Homing Instincts” was selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2014, and her essay “Living on the Hyphen” was selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2015. Sarah holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where she taught creative writing. She is a 2015-2016 Fulbright fellow in Mexico.

Her first book, HOMING INSTINCTS, is forthcoming from Pantheon and Vintage.

Contact her at sarah(at)velamag.com.

SARAH MENKEDICK‘s work has been featured in Harper’s, Pacific Standard, Oxford American, Aeon, Guernica, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh, and she was a 2015-2016 Fulbright fellow in Mexico. Sarah is the founder of Vela, an online magazine of nonfiction writing by women.

Sarah is a writer and editor whose work has been featured in Harper's, Pacific Standard, The Los Angeles Times, Oxford American, Aeon, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Amazon's Kindle Singles, and elsewhere. Her first book, HOMING INSTINCTS, is forthcoming from Pantheon. Sarah holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh. She was a 2015-2016 Fulbright fellow in Mexico. She is the founder of Vela, an online magazine of nonfiction written by women.

Experience
Vela Magazine
Founding Editor
Company NameVela Magazine
Dates EmployedSep 2011 – Present Employment Duration6 yrs 3 mos
In 2011, I founded an online magazine of nonfiction writing by women. I invited five other women writers to become contributing editors, wrote a manifesto, put together an editorial calendar, and developed promotion strategies. Vela has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Outside Online and elsewhere. Vela stories have been selected as "notable" in The Best American Essays and The Best American Sports Writing, highlighted as spectacular nonfiction by The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdrof and featured on Longform, The Atavist, Longreads, and elsewhere.
U.S. Department of State/COMEXUS
Fulbright Garcia-Robles Fellow
Company NameU.S. Department of State/COMEXUS
Dates EmployedSep 2015 – Present Employment Duration2 yrs 3 mos
LocationMexico
Selected as 2015-2016 Fulbright fellow in Mexico. Currently researching and reporting a book about second generation Mexican Americans.
Media (1)This position has 1 media
Fulbright Fellow
Fulbright Fellow
This media is an image
University of Pittsburgh
Instructor, Intro to Nonfiction and Journalism
Company NameUniversity of Pittsburgh
Dates EmployedSep 2010 – May 2013 Employment Duration2 yrs 9 mos
LocationPittsburgh, PA
Taught Seminar in Composition and Intro to Nonfiction and Journalism at the University of Pittsburgh.
Glimpse.org
Editor in Chief
Company NameGlimpse.org
Dates EmployedApr 2010 – Aug 2012 Employment Duration2 yrs 5 mos
I ran the Glimpse Correspondents Program, which was initially sponsored by National Geographic and later run by Matador Network. Each spring and fall I selected ten correspondents from more than 600 applicants and worked with each of these correspondents to develop initial pitches into published feature stories. I was responsible for editing and publishing all stories and coordinating the program.
Harper's Magazine
Intern
Company NameHarper's Magazine
Dates EmployedMay 2011 – Aug 2011 Employment Duration4 mos
LocationNew York, New York
Conducted research for the Harper's Readings and Index sections, shadow-edited feature stories, participated in editorial meetings, and helped develop story and title ideas.
See more positions
Education
University of Pittsburgh
University of Pittsburgh
Degree NameMFA Field Of StudyCreative Nonfiction
Dates attended or expected graduation 2010 – 2013
Fully funded MFA student and writing instructor at the University of Pittsburgh.
School for International Training
School for International Training
Degree NameTESOL Field Of StudyTESOL
Dates attended or expected graduation 2006 – 2006
130 hour intensive TESOL Course in Oaxaca, Mexico, with 12 hour teaching practicum. Course was conducted using experiential, inductive learning methods, with a strong focus on teaching language via these methods.
La Lengua
La Lengua
Field Of StudySpanish
Dates attended or expected graduation 2004 – 2004
Took eighty hours of private, one-on-one Spanish classes at a small Spanish school in Quito, Ecuador.

An account of the author’s transition from wandering spirit to anchored, responsible mother.

The idea of taking a gap year after high school, before entering college, is fairly recent but also increasingly common for students, many of whom take time to travel. Engaging in that most liberal of educations ostensibly provides a rounding to the education received from textbooks and in classrooms. Some students find it suits them so well that a year stretches into two, or, in the case of Vela magazine founder Menkedick, nearly a decade. After receiving a degree in the history of science, the author traveled around the world, teaching English as a second language, working odd jobs, and always seeking new opportunities for travel, “the lines of my journeys tentative, then picking up speed, arching across the planet, pulsing on obscure islands.” Drawing from the experiences and writings of Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Louise Erdrich, Anne Enright, and other writers, Menkedick erases and redraws parts of herself as she experiences greater self-understanding, weighing values and goals against those of others in her family. She finds that her writing, previously fueled by travel, comes to serve as a stand-in for traveling itself. The natural world around her in rural Ohio provided significant opportunities for reassessment, and she embraced the entirely different journey of pregnancy and motherhood. Menkedick's writing is insightful and evocative, drawing on all the senses, and readers will be impressed by the sense of place in her writing, even while she's laboring to discern the meaning in her experience.

Menkedick's driving question is to figure out “whether returning home signifies growing up or giving up or both—and if it’s both, what exactly we want to give up in exchange for what.” The magic of this book is that she makes so personal a question so easily accessible to readers.

Menkedick, a native Midwesterner, spent her 20s traveling around the globe alone, seeking out landscapes and people different from her home. Whether she was picking grapes in France or teaching English on Réunion Island, Menkedick was “using myself like a Monopoly piece, moving around the globe to acquire experience and knowledge.” At 31, she and her husband moved back home to live in a small cabin on her family’s farm in Ohio and have a baby. Menkedick’s intensely intimate collection of essays chronicles her journey from early adulthood, as a young woman who “confused travel with experience and experience with self-definition” into maturity. She beautifully depicts the physiological changes and emotional battles that took place in her mind and body as she and her husband adjusted to their new sedentary life. Menkedick is a superb storyteller and her writing is filled with remarkable scientific and literary references. She explores her reinvigorated relationship with the Midwestern landscape, seeing quiet beauty in an environment she once longed to leave behind. She details the normal day-to-day tensions between her and her husband during the pregnancy. She takes comfort in her close family relationships while contemplating her new identity as a pregnant woman and mother-to-be. This is a moving and deeply personal look at one woman’s transformation.

This debut breaks any existing stereotype of memoir about pregnancy and motherhood. The eight long essays are meandering, smart, and packed with cultural, literary, and scientific references. It is a long trek through the mind of the author, whose stunning intellect is matched by her initial resistance to the insights she eventually gains. Readers get to wade through her stubbornness, how enamored she has been with her previous lifestyle—traveling the world, going to China on a whim, being unfettered—and then experience her agitation with the realities of pregnancy and motherhood—a trip from which there is no return.

First, the news that she and her husband will have a baby strikes her like any decision she makes to do something impulsive. This is just travel of a different kind! She’s briefly elated.

“I spend the first two weeks like this . . . unable to do anything but feel that tingly marvel of news. It is like being in a luminous tunnel, bedazzlement and hypnotic hum, free of time and space. And then I fall out the other side of it, and the architecture of my life collapses.”

Menkedick tells us she goes into a deep depression. She looks longingly back on a few months prior, when she and her husband Jorge “lobbed life options around like badminton birdies . . .” She says, “Without the opportunity and desire to leap into the wider world at a moment’s notice, I don’t know who I am . . .”

This panic, and temporary loss of identity is what leads her to some of this book’s wisdom:

“How much of myself is a core self, and how much is a reflection of the circumstances in which I choose to place myself . . . ? How much of me is flimsy construction, how much bedrock?”

Menkedick admits to having “confused travel with experience and experience with self-definition.” This realization has a gestation period as long as that of her child. The author begins to glean that the most significant thing to happen to her yet will not involve pursuit of the exotic, but will be grounded in the domestic, and rest upon the history of so many women before her—pregnancy, labor, childbirth, and the ensuing self-erasure of new motherhood.

These realizations are the high points of this beautifully written narrative. For example, Menkedick becomes outraged to learn that a group of midwives who she respects oppose her own stance in the controversy around vaccinations; she plans on vaccinating her child. But Menkedick wonders what it means to have a stance, and where her righteousness will take her. She says, “All that I am left with is my own arrogance.”

These admissions of inexperience, error, righteousness, arrogance, and flimsy construction of self, make her trustworthy as a writer, and endear her to the reader. There is nothing more essential to memoir than the writer’s willingness to be self-convicting.

To her credit, she gets how myopic she’s been: “I couldn’t understand until I became a mother. I so completely inhabited my own story that I failed to see its construction, its ultimate flimsiness—the way I had cut myself out of it like a chain of paper dolls, so many one-dimensional selves holding hands into infinity.” Readers will admire Menkedick’s self-scrutiny and candor.

The more the author lets go of ego, the more she begins to understand the power of simplicity and the calm of a broader perspective: “I go nowhere, and yet, in going nowhere I am in a way I cannot be when I impose myself on the world. As the winter tips into spring and spring brightens into early summer, the world comes into relief: immediate, overwhelming, and unmediated. Instead of me, there is the morning porch, the coreopsis making their slow revolution with the sun, the driveway under a starry cosmos of maples, a dog with a fly on her nose, June’s orange-cream evenings fizzling into night. The bare bones of life, unadorned with expectation or seeking, only ever right now.”

A lovely excerpt from A Wilderness of Waiting, a favorite chapter:

“The biggest surprise of pregnancy . . . [is the] revelation that in the monotony lies a kind of release. Waiting has become an art, a state of suspended grace, an alternate way of living . . . For the first time in my life, I understand the concept of home. Home is . . . a giving in, an acceptance, the place where I finally strip life of all its décor of aspiration and regret . . . It is the space in which I forgo both anticipation and nostalgia . . .”

Chapters about her grandmother and her father are the most generous in terms of development of other characters. (Readers don’t really get to know her husband Jorge; perhaps there could’ve been a chapter devoted to him.) Menkedick’s portrayal of her father in the final chapter, The Lake, is specific, gorgeous, and poignant. Readers will fall in love with this dad, and it’s a credit to the writer that we see him in so much detail, that we come to know him.

For someone clearly as smart and as talented as Menkedick, it’s surprising to see her create nouns out of adjectives by adding the suffix “-ness.” Why say “gratefulness” when gratitude is the noun? Or “quietness” when the noun is simply quiet. In another example, she talks about the “worthwhileness” of something. This misuse of language is so pervasive now that it won’t likely strike other readers as odd. But it stands out against her otherwise brilliant prose.

Still, Menkedick redeems herself with some of the most gloriously original descriptions: a full moon that has the “sandy color and regal fatigue of an old lion;” beaches that are “slivers of toasted almond;” a bird’s nest, “tidy as a ballerina’s bun . . . ;” and her young niece and nephew, who “consume time . . . the way they gulp lemonade.”

And I doubt there’s a better, more accurate description anywhere than the one on page 171, of a woman’s experience of early labor vs. hard labor. Menkedick is a writer to watch.

There is something about being a free-spirited wanderer. The adventure. Life on your terms. Then along comes motherhood. It tames us in some of the most profound ways and frees our soul in ways we cannot begin to express.

Then along comes Sarah Menkedick who gives identity to the emotions we have all experienced. Her free-spirited wandering soul reveals the worth of even the most mundane details of life.

In her book Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm, which I received for review from Penguin Books, Menkedick shares a collection of essays, so interwoven that they seem to just exist as one. She shares how she experienced life transitioning from wanderer to life with her husband, in a cabin, on her father’s farm, awaiting the arrival of her daughter.

I love her reflections of her dad. She shares his example of love, kindness, encouragement, optimism and the sacrifices he chose, ungrudgingly, to open the possibility for her own. Motherhood gives her a greater understanding of the instincts that lessons that allowed her dad to shelter her spirit and also send it soaring. I thought it was a powerful shift in roles as her dad holds her fussing daughter while Sarah makes lunch and then feeds it to her father with her fingers. I’ve experienced these feelings and the reality that my parents are approaching an older age. I’ve lived the moments where I am the parent and my grandmother the child.

She perfectly captures those small, mundane moments that mean nothing, and yet everything.

It’s a journey of seeking to be and finally finding a sense of place.

Sarah has a beautiful writing style. It is almost poetry. It is honest, courageous, caring, and seems to hold time still as the reader experiences that moment and the feelings she has written.

About Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm

Sarah Menkedick spent her twenties trekking alone across South America, teaching English to recalcitrant teenagers on Reunion Island, picking grapes in France and camping on the Mongolian grasslands; for her, meaning and purpose were to be found on the road, in-flight from the ordinary. The biggest and most transformative adventure of her life might be one she never anticipated: at 31, she moves into a tiny 19th-century cabin on her family’s Ohio farm, and begins the journey into motherhood.

In eight vivid and boldly questioning essays, Menkedick explores the luminous, disorienting time just before and after becoming a mother. As she reacquaints herself with the subtle landscapes of the Midwest and adjusts to the often surprising physicality of pregnancy, she ruminates on what this new stage of life means for her long-held concepts of self, settling, and creative fulfillment. In “Millie, Mildred, Grandma Menkedick,” she considers the nature of story through the life of her tough German grandmother, who raised two boys as a single mother in the 1950s and then spent her seventies traveling the world with her best friend Marge; in “Motherland,” on a trip back to Oaxaca, Mexico to visit her husband’s family, she finally embraces her Midwestern roots; in “The Milk Cave,” she discovers in breastfeeding a new appreciation for the spiritual and artistic potential of boredom; and in “The Lake,” she revisits her childhood with her father, whose relentless optimism and mystical streak she sees anew once she has a child of her own.

A story of a traveler come home to the farm; of becoming a mother in spite of reservations and doubt; and of learning to appreciate the power and beauty of the quotidian, Homing Instincts speaks to the deepest concerns and hopes of a generation.